"Nystrom's gift as a poet is that she doesn't stop looking, and her poems make sure it is all still there for us to see."-Eamon Grennan
The landscape of Torn Sky is South Dakota, a place of extremes, where parched land meets frigid air and exiled Native Americans still struggle to live in peace alongside ranchers. Nystrom's poems weave together the voices of her childhood with ghosts of the last two tumultuous centuries and articulate with such subtle and unsentimental grace that each side is understood.
Debra Nystrom was born in Pierre, South Dakota. She is the author of one previous book, A Quarter Turn. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and teaches at the University of Virginia.
From the Inside Flap
Debra Nystrom's genius in Torn Sky is to give us a version of the American West that includes the mythic and the epic, but doesn't exclude the historical and the personal. Her beautiful rendering of particular lives and voices gives us her deeply inward "feel" for landscape, the hardships of farming and ranching, and the bloodiness and violence of America's westward expansion at the expense of Native American peoples. Ultimately though, these poems go beyond their occasions, and are as much about the complex dynamics of memory and loss, and what Yeats called the phantasmagoria of history, as they are about the poet's loving attachment to home ground. Intimate, searching, deeply skeptical, these poems are as beautifully written as they are morally challenging and unexpected. — Sleigh --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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